Archive for the ‘Projects’ Category

Yes, it is true. I really neglected the blog for a while. So what am I doing at the moment?

First of all, I working on gamekit to have it in shape for creating the kind of games I want to create. For that I’m doing lots of bugfixes and working mainly on the runtime and it’s lua-layer. Actually I love this project. Finally I’m home in case of game-engine. Now it has to be stable enough for all platforms, which will still be a tough way,…

For people that don’t know gamekit (and I think that are 99,99%). It is a blender-based game-engine. This means you use blender as scene-graph, use (if you want) its bge-bricks for visual logic (most of them are implemented in gamekit) or use lua-scripting inside blender or use c++. Of course you can use all 3 methods altogether. The game can produce code for Linux(my main platform), win and osx plus android and iOS (but the mobile versions still need lots of optimizations).

Caution: Since this is a 100% community driven engine, there isn’t that much documentation People who are not willing to make their hands dirty and need everything on a silver plate to produce something should switch to the big good documented and more stable engines like unity3d or udk (btw: I like unity but I do like more to play in the dirt :p)

…and if I’m not working on gamekit I’m working on a game-project with a bunch of people that are located somewhere in Germany. So it is some kind of distributed working. At the moment we see if we can get a publisher of that master-piece of game software

…and if I’m not working on this one, I’m involved in a game-project at the University of Applied Sciences Trier…

…and if I’m not doing this I’m working on a super ambitious Software-Project that should/would/could change software-development, but actually that might only work in my head *lol*

…and if I’m not doing this I’m running or biking so that my head and soul get at least a bit to see from the world. Sports is one of the most important things of the day.

Biggest problem is the 24h-day constraint…there is just too less time for too much things to do

Mini-LD is waiting! This time they decided to have a very free time constraint. You can choose 48h until the end of october to do your work. Actually I wasn’t so happy with that cause I think that coding it the same time with different people is most of the fun. So it might be some lonly rangers doing their work and noone really cares about it!? Nevertheless this weekend I wouldn’t have enough time to do it so this rule is time good for me as I intend to invest the upcoming weekend for that…. Now I’m curious about the theme and looking forward for the competition.

At the moment I’m trying to add normalmaps to the stencilmaped objects. Actually I haven’t much experiense with shaders yet but it seems that with the use of the shader I used it was not possible use different texturesizes. But I’m on it and hope to solve that today.

Actually I decided during the week not to participate at the miniLD. But I couldn’t stand it and just started…As always my plan is to use jMonkeyEngine(Java) and as always I have some problems with the Pipleline blender->jme. The exporter is on a very good way (Thanks to blaine) but because of heavy development things are changing quite fast!? Nevertheless after one evening spending with exporter problems I decided to switch to panda3d (python). Too bad I never did something with it…but let’s have a try. Here is my first character. As the theme is “Sandbox” this guy’s name is “Sandro Sand”.

This is a blender render and actually he doesn’t have eyes (yet).

Now with terrain and already “ingame” using the panda3d-engine:

Day2: Sandro Sand got a new terrain! Is able to jump, can walk backwards(!) can only walk on terrain I want him to move on. Now I want to check the collision-detection with running into objects other then the ground….until now panda3d is quite cool.

Wow,…didn’t think I could do it, but I managed to somehow finish the game! Ok,…it is still buggy with some issues. For example the whole camera-stuff is very fragile. There is one situation where the camera jump in “CLOUD”-mode. YOu can see the little Sandro in 2-3pixels! But that doesn’t matter now. For the ending I even have something like a “in-game-sequence” where little sandro is happy that he finally reached the last sandbox!

Here 2 Screenshot from the final version:

As a final conclusion I can say that developing in python was a quite astonishing experience. Everything just worked…hard to explain. Using panda3d was great. Like python everything was fine and more important the documentation of panda3d is just amazing! Actually I don’t know if I will start with something like debugging or just leave it as it is….Nevertheless I’m quite happy with the result. Still there is no real cool gameplay and not so much fun, but nevertheless it is going into the right direction…..

Ok, finally I decided to start a project in panda3d. It looks for me perfect for starting with 3d game development as it is very good commented and the graphicspipeline seems stable for me. I had no problems exporting my animated 3d model with panda3d’s egg-exporter for blender. Loading an actor (a animated model in panda3d) are 2 lines and calling an animation another line like actor.loop(”walk”).

With all that I had problems in jMonkeyEngine. Neither MD5 nor ogre was able to load my model. Ok,…I’m quite sure that the limiting factor was my model. Nevertheless I give panda3d and especially python a chance.

It’s pyweek! Yeah….first experiences in python! I use easyeclipse for python that has the python-plugin already installed as IDE. And try to use pygame in order to get something work Well,…day one was not as productive as I wanted to. I tried a lot of things even thought about using cocos2d that looks quite promising. But I decided to keep that in mind for further experiments and “just” use pygame.

The theme is “GET OFF MY LAWN”. I decided to develop something like a action-game where you have to defend your home from incoming “enemies”. Still I have some starting problems with python but I’m getting more and more familiar. Until now I was able to load a tilemap, pick out the tiles I wanted to, put them in something like a hashmap and readin a map(text)file in order to build a nice map out of that tiles.

Btw: in this compo it is allowed to use 3rd-party resources. And I used this tilemap as a start. Good I don’t have to loose too much time for graphic-stuff. I want to use as much 3rd-party resources as possible. Main task for that compo is to go into python not become a graphicsmaster.

Until now this is all I got. Isn’t it amazing?

EDIT:

It seems that the easyeclipse python-edition is not uptodate. If installing you should get the newest pydev at this update-url:

Well,…this time again: I failed the LD! The theme was “Advancing wall of doom”.

I wanted to create an jump’n'run platform-game where you have to try to go high and higher the wall with the help of different helpers. e.g. moving object you have to climb on and stay on top. But that seemed to be too diffuclt for me! I tried to do it without pyhsics-engine. Well actually all I should have to do is send a ray from the feet of my player down the Y-Axis and look how far the distance is to the next pick….. That worked fine for the static objects! But moving objects had some problems here and my player was falling in between….Not good!Too bad I was too small minded to rethink my algorithm and well that’s was it!Sad but true!

The best I can take from the experience is that I started using blender as level-editor. During LD I exported to Wavefront .obj-Files and loaded in the level. Animations was handled by MD5. But again I had real problems importing it to jME…..

BBUUUUTT NOW as all is over and I regained power again I remembered a dotscene-Ogre-Exporter for blender and found out the the radakan-ogreimporter was able to load this. And it worked perfectly! Even animated meshes was handled! Ok…that came 48h too late! BUT it came! I’m really happy about it! And will write a tutorial to share that experience.

Well, lot happend since LD#13! Since then I am coding (for private purpose) nearly every day with lots of fun and full of will to learn more more and more. LD#13 activated me again so I am really happy I found that competition and I am still very sad that I didn’t find it much earlier.

Nevertheless my 2nd real LD is knocking at the door and this time my main goal is to finish. Not like last time where I published more or less a buggy demo.

To achive that I have to

keep the game simple and easy to understand for persons != me

sleep enough and also leave home for some time

set my own deadline so it is enough time for packing the application

10 days 17 hours 1 minutes left means for me to get up at 5 am to start the compo. In order to be able to work until the last second I took holiday for the day after. Wouldn’t be healthy to go that day.

But one is already fix. I will again use JAVA, again use JMonkeyEngine for OpenGL-Stuff, using blender for creating 3D-Models and gimp for painting-works. This time I won’t have to learn so much basics during the compo and there will (hopefully) no brass band in front of my window (it was christmas-market and it took me quite some time to think about how I could mute them )

Can’t wait until the voting-period begins….

(And on Sunday 2009/04/26 the PyWeek will start where I want to gather first python experiences!)

Well, for some strange reason I had the feeling to switch to blender in order to create 3d-Models. Well, ok! Blender is for sure very very good but maybe even too powerful what makes the inital steps quite hard. Nevertheless I started (again) with going deeper into blender although I was ill (what makes the project even harder).

As I am still working on my RPG-Engine and a first techdemo I just wanted to build a 3D-Model, put a texture on it, give it an amature and animate it. And the most important step export it in a way JMonkeyEngine is able to read it. That seems to be the hardest part of all. Currently there a two formats that seems to be best for importing animated textured models into jme2. MD5 (Quake3-Models) or OgreMeshes (Ogre3D-Engine).

For me it seems that the ogre-importer of the radakan-project seems a good way to export for jme.

For the importer there is a ogreloader-project inside the radakans svn:

https://radakan.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/radakan

or you can download an archive. (don’t know if it is the current version)

There you can find jme2-typical tests how to integrate an orge.mesh to jme2.

Well that’s it for the moment. Once I am really sure what to do in blender in order to do everything the right way with texturing, rigging and skinning I will try to write down something like a basic tutorial cause since I started with jme it was always a big issue how to import models that fulfill all my needs.

Well, actually the progress of my RPG-Engine is going on very slowly but it is still alive! I just added tha ability to add actions to any entity that is included in the world. Also a very generic dialogue-system was integrated that is a bit complicated to handle. For that I have to write an abstraction maybe in XML to load the dialogues by file.